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Sheila Dikshit () (née Kapoor; 31 March 1938 – 20 July 2019) was an Indian politician. The longest-serving chief minister of Delhi, as well as the longest-serving female chief minister in Indian history, she served for a period of 15 years beginning in 1998. Dikshit led the Indian National Congress party to three consecutive electoral victories in Delhi.
Dikshit lost the December 2013 elections of the Delhi Legislative Assembly to the Bharatiya Janata Party, though Aam Aadmi Party formed a minority government with outside support from the INC, with Arvind Kejriwal as the chief minister. She briefly served as the Governor of Kerala in 2014. Dikshit was later declared a chief ministerial candidate for the Indian National Congress in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly election, but withdrew her nomination (Akhilesh Yadav was announced as candidate). She was appointed president of Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee on 10 January 2019 to led general election in Delhi and remained in office until her death in July later that year.
Earlier, in the early 1970s, she was chairperson of the Young Women's Association and was instrumental in the setting up of two of the most successful hostels for working women in Delhi. She was also the secretary of the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust.
In the 1998 parliamentary elections, Dikshit was defeated by Bharatiya Janata Party's Lal Bihari Tiwari in East Delhi constituency. Later in the year, Dikshit became Chief Minister of Delhi, a position she held until 2013. Dikshit represented the Gole Market assembly constituency in the 1998 and 2003 Assembly elections and New Delhi constituency from 2008.
In 2009 and 2013, Dikshit was investigated for alleged misuse of government funds, but no charges were brought.
Her party was wiped out in the 2013 Delhi Legislative Assembly election and Arvind Kejriwal, founder of the Aam Aadmi Party, won the election in the New Delhi Assembly constituency by a margin of 25,864 votes. She resigned on 8 December 2013, but remained the caretaker chief minister of Delhi until the new government was sworn in on 28 December 2013. She was appointed the governor of Kerala in March 2014, but was forced to resign five months later. She contested the 2019 Lok Sabha Elections as the candidate for Indian National Congress in the North East Delhi Constituency but came second after Bharatiya Janata Party's Manoj Tiwari.
Dikshit was the mother of two children: a son, Sandeep Dikshit, who is a former member of Parliament of the 15th Lok Sabha from East Delhi, and a daughter, Latika Dikshit, who was married to Syed Mohammad Imran, an architect.
Dikshit underwent angioplasty in November 2012. In 2018, she had heart surgery in University Hospital in Lille, France.
The Delhi government announced a two-day mourning period on her death, and accorded her a state funeral.
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